CRITICAL TERMS (PART 1)

CRITICAL TERMS 

APORIA

A Greek term that denotes an insoluble problem or paradox; etymologically it comes from aporos meaning impassable (a-, without; poros, passage). In rhetoric and literary theory, it is often used to indicate those moments in a text where meaning becomes ambiguous or appears self-contradictory. In his book Aporias, Jacques Derrida differentiates an aporia from a problem, arguing that the former is ‘the experience of the nonpassage . . . What, in sum, appears to block our way or to separate us in the very place where it would no longer be possible to constitute a problem, a project, or a projection’ (Derrida 1993: 12). In other words, while a problem can be resolved within the rules of logical argument, an aporia calls those very rules into question and remains impossible to incorporate into a straightforward logic.

BASE / SUPERSTRUCTURE

A materialist conception of the relationship between economics and culture. ‘Base’ refers to the economic modes of production at the basis of any society. This economic base determines the ‘superstructure’, or the public, political and intellectual configuration of that social system. Karl Marx proposed this system in his ‘Preface’ to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859). For Marx the individual is subject to external forces ‘independent of their will’ which are shaped by the modes of production. This principle forms the basis for the everyday formation of judicial and religious institutions. Marx contended that this produced ‘definite forms of social consciousness’ which, in a capitalist society, were ‘false’, or an illusion to secure social compliance. These early formulations are now generally regarded as excessively deterministic. In place of the base/superstructure dichotomy, subsequent Marxist theorists have elaborated more refined conceptions of the material construction of society. These include Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, Louis Althusser’s outline of the Ideological State Apparatus and Theodor Adorno’s work on the culture industry.

CARNIVAL/CARNIVALESQUE

A term that came to prominence after the publication of Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World (1965). Bakhtin identifies a shift from popular festive life to literary culture, arguing that Rabelais’s grotesque representation of the human body, linguistic diversity and taste for parody derive from the popular practices of carnival in Renaissance Europe. Bakhtin conceives of carnival as a utopian moment when dominant constraints and hierarchies are temporarily overturned: authority figures are parodied, routines are disrupted, and the body is celebrated. Rabelais’s writing, with its focus upon the grotesque body, draws its subversive energy from carnival practices and, in this sense, it can be described as ‘carnivalesque’. Bakhtin’s ideas about carnival are valuable because they provide a framework for assessing the influence of popular forms on literature. Critics have explored the relationship between the historical carnival and the political uses of popular culture in Renaissance literature; but the term ‘carnivalesque’ has also been stretched beyond the actual historical moment of carnival to describe writing that reproduces the inversions of carnival. This approach has been used to study writers such as the British novelist Angela Carter, who employ popular against elite forms, mixing a variety of styles and voices.

CHORA

Julia Kristeva’s concept of the semiotic chora is developed out of Lacanian psychoanalysis and attempts to account for the repressed linguistic and libidinal excesses of the speaking subject that originate in the pre-Oedipal phase. Kristeva appropriates the chora from Plato’s Timaeus (c. 360 BC) to denote an unnameable space or receptacle formed by the drives which are anterior to identity. This chora refers to the earliest stage in psychosexual development in which the child is dominated by the drives and is unable to distinguish boundaries between itself and its mother. At this stage the child experiences its body as an undifferentiated, ungendered space across which chaotic and rhythmical drives of physical and psychic impulses flow. These drives form the basis of the semiotic chora, which is the alternative non-signifying element of meaning within language. Although it is repressed by the symbolic, this semiotic chora remains active beneath the rational discourse of the speaking subject and manifests itself in the ‘vocal or kinetic rhythm’ of poetry and other non-rational discourses, threatening to disrupt the stability of meaning and subjectivity.

CHRONOTOPE

Term coined by Mikhail Bakhtin in the 1930s to describe the way in which time and space are represented and connected in literature. In his essay ‘Forms of Time and the Chronotope of the Novel’, Bakhtin offers a history of the novel, which aims to show that different novels are structured according to different ideas of time and space. Moreover, Bakhtin argues that changes in chronotopes, or dominant metaphors of time and space, can be explained by broader historical developments. The concern of Bakhtin’s work, such as in his discussions of language and carnival, is to explore the relationship between forms and structures, and the transformations of history. His approach is useful not only because it identifies links between the metaphorical significance of motifs such as ‘the path of life’ and the narrative progress of a character, but also because it encourages analysis of time and space in the context of specific socio-historical conditions.

DESIRE

This term has long been central to Western culture, but its contemporary theoretical importance derives from the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s elucidation of unconscious desire. Sigmund Freud observed that the human sexual drive is never wholly satisfied. For Lacan, this is because desire is produced by the subjection of the human organism to the law of language, which is for him the fundamental organizing principle of consciousness. Desire, which he differentiates from bodily need, is conceivable as the structural effect of the split that language introduces between our animal and speaking selves.

Desire comes from the ‘Other’, the place of speech, which is both outside and inside us. We internalize speech by learning it, but it never truly becomes ‘ours’ as its meanings are not generated by individual subjects but by the arbitrary differences between signifiers. Lack results from this awkward compromise between the general and the specific, the linguistic and the organic, in which something of the latter is consistently lost. Desire, which is not only sexual, relentlessly attempts to fill this lack, settling on various objects which seem to offer fulfilment: hence the appeal of a different lover or new car. The lack cannot be filled, and so desire keeps going, finding new objects, and making the grass appear greener on the other side of the fence. It is effectively the desire of nothing, of no thing that exists, which is why its sign is the phallus. Though Lacan’s account may appear pessimistic, desire’s energy can be vital, revolutionary and exciting. Founded upon lack, its restless dissatisfaction drives change. However, it can also be destructive. Desire could only be satisfied in the end, which is to say in death: it can thus become the desire for annihilation of self and other.

Lacan’s definition has been critiqued and extended by the philosophers Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari among others, but remains of central importance to accounts of subjectivity, sexuality and culture.

DIALECTIC

Derived from the word ‘dialogue’, meaning the pursuit of truth through debate or discussion, the term denotes the belief that change is driven by contradiction. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato’s dialogues represented discussions in which the truth of a proposition was tested, and its contradictions revealed, by question and answer.

The late eighteenth-century German philosopher, G. W. F. Hegel developed a form of dialectical logic that influenced a group of mid-nineteenth-century German philosophers known as the ‘Young Hegelians’, which included the political philosopher Karl Marx. Marx’s theory of ‘historical materialism’ applied the dialectic to the study of human history, while his collaborator Friedrich Engels controversially attempted to develop a scientific method of ‘dialectical materialism’, founded on ‘three Laws’ applicable to human history and the natural world. The first of these is the unity of opposites, which simply refers to the interdependence of two contradictory principles; an example of this kind of relationship is that between capitalists and workers. The second is the transformation of quantity into quality, whereby gradual quantitative change brings about a fundamental qualitative change. To take a proverbial example: placing a single straw on a camel’s back will effect no qualitative change; continue to do so and eventually the load will be so heavy that the camel’s back will break. The third is the negation of the negation, which occurs when elements of a prior stage of development subsequently recur in a modified form; Engels gives the example of evolution as it takes place in plants.

Though the dialectic is primarily associated with Marxist thought, it was Hegel’s contemporary Johann Fichte who detailed the most common explanation of the dialectic: two competing terms (‘thesis’ and ‘antithesis’) generate a third (the ‘synthesis’), which incorporates aspects of both. Marx, for example, believed conflict between bourgeoisie and proletariat would lead to revolution and a new, productive but classless society. The dialectical conception of change continues to influence contemporary theorists of culture and society, although its universalizing premises have been challenged by many thinkers associated with poststructuralism.

DIFFERANCE

A term coined by Jacques Derrida, which forms a central strand of his attack on the logic and values of traditional Western philosophy – what Derrida calls ‘logocentrism’. Perhaps unhelpfully, Derrida claims in Margins of Philosophy (1972) that difference is ‘literally neither a word nor a concept’ and that it ‘has neither existence nor essence’. What is clear, however, is that differance derives from the Latin verb differre and the French différer, which in English have given rise to two distinct verbs: to defer and to differ. Differance incorporates both of these meanings and thus serves to emphasize two key Derridean concerns: with absence rather than presence (full meaning is never present, but is instead constantly deferred because of the difference characteristic of language); and with difference rather than identity (Derrida focuses on the difference between terms, and the spaces between words, rather than on the terms in themselves and any positive value they might otherwise be thought to have).

In describing differance as the ‘systematic play of differences’ which is built into language, and highlighting the dependence of language upon ‘intervals’ (spaces between words) without which words could not function, Derrida carries Saussure’s theory of language as a system of differences to its most extreme conclusion. He also develops and expands the emphasis upon difference which has been central to the work of Nietzsche and Heidegger. In addition, differance reiterates Derrida’s desire to assert the primacy of writing over speech, because the ‘a’ which makes it distinguishable from difference is only detectable when the word is written or read, not when it is spoken or heard (différance and différence are pronounced in exactly the same way in French); so differance is also an attack on the perceived phonocentrism of Western philosophy, i.e. its privileging of speech over writing.

DISCOURSE

This term refers to the use of language as it is embedded in social practice. In emphasizing the social and functional aspects of language, discourse analysts seek to examine the rules governing

language use as it is deployed within wider social structures of regulation and control. Within critical theory, this study is related, most importantly, to the work of French structuralist Michel Foucault, who understood discourse to be part of the social structure itself. Any language community, such as medicine, will share a methodology, phraseology and a body of thought which makes up their discourse. This discursive field contains within it rules governing language use within the community; thus certain usages will be prohibited as unacceptable or excluded altogether. By examining the historical formation of, for example, medical discourse, Foucault shows that the rules governing acceptable language use amount to a discursive regime which determines not only what can be said but, ultimately, what can be known. Discourse is thus a site of power as it constitutes both the sphere of knowledge and the community perceived to be in possession of it: ‘It is in discourse that power and knowledge are joined together’ (Foucault 1984: 100). While Foucault’s earlier work focused primarily on the institutionalization of certain discourses, hence certain knowledge regimes, in the service of social control, his later work on sexuality refined the concept somewhat. Here, the medical and juridical discourses concerning homosexuality in the nineteenth century are shown to give rise to a ‘reverse’ or counter-discourse which allows for the possibility of resistance. The writings around homosexuality, which were designed to define the excluded category of the homosexual, also guaranteed the emergence of a new identity which ‘began to speak on its own behalf . . . often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified’ (1984: 101). Discourse here remains a channel for power but this is no longer understood to be controlling, rather strategic. The reworking of discourse becomes a tactical force within the ongoing strategies of power and resistance.

ÉCRITURE FÉMININE

The leading practitioner of écriture féminine is the French poststructuralist Hélène Cixous whose works, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ and ‘Sorties’ (originally published in French in 1975), are manifestos of the practice. This form of writing attempts to inscribe femininity by challenging the phallocentric discourses of sexuality and subjectivity posited by the psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan in which women are marked as deviant on account of their lack of a penis. Cixous makes a close link between sexuality and writing and focuses on the imaginary mother/child dyad of the pre-Oedipal phase, which forms the repressed ‘Other’ within the unconscious upon entry into the symbolic. Cixous argues that writing is the place of the ‘Other’ and the feminine text attempts to write through the body the unconscious polymorphous drives of the child and its closeness to the body of the ‘m/other’. The subversive potential of this ‘what-comesbefore-language’ (1986: 88) is expressed through the use of puns and metaphors which attempt to foreground the polysemic, literally ‘multiple meaning’, nature of signification. Cixous refuses to define the feminine, insisting that it must remain an open question and that the writer must actively search for gaps, disruptions or excesses in language, not in order to ‘master’ otherness, but ‘to see it, to experience what she is not, what she is, what she can be’ (1986: 86). The connections between the female body and the ‘feminine’ remain ambiguous. Whilst she does not attempt to fix the ‘feminine’ biologically, her maternal metaphors of writing in ‘white ink’ suggest a female biological essence (1981: 251). However, this seeming impossible logic is strategic in its attempt to displace (masculine) binary logic, formulated on the principle of Oneness and the effacement of the feminine, by gesturing towards the (im)possiblity (within phallocentric logic) of articulating an ‘other’ discourse of heterogeneity and difference.

EGO

A concept defined by Sigmund Freud, who conceived the human subject as being divided between the ego, the superego and the id. In the Freudian schema the ego represents the subject’s conscious self-image, a defensive space from which the violence and irrationalism of the id is excluded. The ego thus provides a vantage point, in terms of the reciprocal gaze between spectator and image outlined in the Lacanian mirror stage, from which the subject can view the ego as both a unified formation and, crucially, as an object worthy of love. The ego is that component of subjective identity that, in terms of ‘normal’ psychical development, is what represents the subject in social, intersubjective relations. What the ego represents is how the subject would like to be viewed, minus the unconscious, destructive and anti-social urges of the id and the punitive sadism of the superego.

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CRITICAL TERMS (PART 2)

CRITICAL TERMS

ENLIGHTENMENT

Although its origins can be traced back as far as the late middle ages, Enlightenment thinking derives its name from the philosophical revolution of 1720–80 whose participants aimed to ‘enlighten’ their less forward-thinking peers. Influenced by pioneering thinkers such as Francis Bacon, René Descartes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, philosophers including Voltaire and Immanuel Kant mounted a direct challenge to the dominant religious doctrines that determined and organized ‘knowledge’. Disputing the church’s pre-eminence in governing common societal wisdom, and the myth of the ‘natural’ rights of the hereditary aristocracy, the Enlightenment encouraged individualism, reason and freedom. It was a combination of these doctrines that resulted in the French Revolution of 1789, where the partnership between church, state and gentry was so manifestly challenged and defeated.

One of the leading pioneers of ‘enlightened’ thinking was Galileo Galilei, who in 1632 advanced his Copernican assertion that the earth orbits the sun. Because his account directly contradicted the biblical notion that God’s earth is the dynamic celestial body, Galileo’s teaching was denounced, and he was forced to publish his later works clandestinely. In spite of the papal edict against Galileo’s theory, the revolution of thought that his work initiated could not be disparaged. And so, in the mid eighteenth century, scholars such as Diderot and Voltaire published 17 volumes of the seminal Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers, commonly known as The Encyclopedia. Intrinsic to the work of the ‘Encyclopedists’ was a promotion of the attributes of science and measurability over the Christian revelations of nature and moral truth. Whilst ‘enlightened’ thinking continues to influence contemporary critical theory, it does have its critics. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer present an acute Marxist critique of its limitations. For Adorno and Horkheimer, all ‘enlightened’ societies are unreservedly repressed, and within Dialectic of Enlightenment they examine how the apparatus of the culture industry manifests an ‘enlightenment of mass deception’. In addition to the Marxist critique, postcolonial theorists argue that the Enlightenment idealized its European notions as universal truths and subsequently allows little or no ‘speech gap’ for the subaltern. Critics aside, the Enlightenment revolutionized the way we think in terms of critical interpretation and general cognition; it also continues to uphold the belief that knowledge should be impartial, neutral and objective.

GENEALOGY

(Greek genea meaning race) The study of an entity’s lineage, which within critical theory is primarily associated with the work of Michel Foucault. Developing Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality, it is Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (1970) that serves as the key text for understanding genealogy in relation to analytical thinking. For Foucault, genealogical investigation should not be a passive programme of simply looking at the archaeology or architecture of discourse, but one that actively interrogates it in order to uncover its hidden values. Adopting a Nietzschean refusal of the notion of truths outside their contextual setting, Foucault argues that discourses and ‘what we know’ can only be fully understood when their genealogical development is addressed. Such analysis will reveal the hidden structures that support not just the knowledge base of society but also its ideology and power relations. Genealogical investigation reveals that discourse, ideas, and ‘universal truths’ are riddled with human intervention and implicated within the maintenance of society’s conformity.

GRAND NARRATIVE

An all-encompassing theory which claims to provide an explanation for all of the narratives in circulation in a culture. For Jean-François Lyotard, grand narratives (grands récits) have characterized modernity, and he refers to examples such as Christianity, socialism, capitalism and hermeneutics in the introduction to The Postmodern Condition. Any theory which claims to account for the true meaning of all social and cultural forms can be considered to be a grand narrative. Thus it could be seen that even an oppositional philosophy such as feminism becomes a grand narrative when it claims to offer a totalizing account of woman, thereby subsuming the differences between women. Grand narratives typically offer the subject a specific role in relation to the future revelation of a singular social or aesthetic truth. Thus, in the case of Marxist thought, all social formations, including art, literature, etc., are considered as outcomes of the capitalist system, whose inconsistencies bear the seeds of the future revolution, which will ultimately emancipate the working subject – the hero of the socialist grand narrative. Crucially, Lyotard finds that the postmodern condition is characterized by a new scepticism towards the grand narratives of modernity.

HEGEMONY

A political concept that explains the oppression-based relationships between the dominant and compliant classes of Western capitalist democracies. Whilst Karl Marx and Georg Lukács have also written extensively about hegemonic states, it is the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci whose name is synonymous with the term. Unlike many theories of power, hegemony does not advocate a ‘top-down’ dictatorial model of rule. Within hegemonic relations, the dominant class or classes favour encouragement over coercion. Rather than autocratic rule, hegemony functions through consensus, in spite of the inherent oppression and/or intergroup exploitation. Hegemonic societies are characterized by an absence of revolution and social uprisings, their sense of equilibrium brought about by the subaltern group’s acceptance of the dominant ideals. This does not, however, rule out the potential for conflict and protestation by the subordinate classes. Agreeing to ‘empty compromises’, the ruling class(es) accommodate the demands of the ruled and suppress potential unrest. Crucially, those sectors of society that are challenged and changed by such interactions are never key strategic ones such as those that maintain the status quo. The concept of hegemony also features extensively within Louis Althusser’s writing on the Ideological State Apparatus, those social bodies that can only function through society’s acceptance. These are in stark contrast to the Repressive State Apparatus such as the army and the penal system that often encounter, and are based upon, aggression and resistance. More recently Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics provides a comprehensive critique of the term. Investigating its genealogy, they argue that in its current and accepted guise, hegemony is – to borrow from Michel Foucault – ‘the archaeology of silence’. For Laclau and Mouffe, hegemony is not so much a localized space of ‘unthought’ but of a reductive closed paradigm.

HERMENEUTICS

The study of understanding, which takes its name from the Greek god Hermes, the deliverer and interpreter of messages. Although traditionally reserved for the interpretation of biblical texts, ‘modern’ hermeneutics embodies two distinct branches, the interpretation of textual artefacts, and cultural events.

Evolving in the early nineteenth century, it is widely held that modern hermeneutics began with the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher who, in his 1838 Hermeneutik und Kritik, sought through textual analyses to establish ‘what the author meant’. As the study of hermeneutics has developed, however, the presence and intention of the author has become less significant. Modern hermeneutics is now applicable to a myriad of texts, and irrespective of whether written, performed or photographic, all texts undergoing hermeneutic analysis are processed in the same manner, with the analyst alternating between general and specific evaluations. Having initially studied the text, the analyst forms a general hypothesis of its meaning. This initial evaluation is then tempered with a closer rereading of the text based on what is now ‘known’. Subsequent rereadings and alternations between the general and the specific, the ‘familiar’ and the ‘unfamiliar’, are repeated until the disparate factions merge and a tentative interpretation can be formed.

In addition to the pioneering work of Schleiermacher, theorists such as Paul Ricoeur and Hans-Georg Gadamer have provided valuable insight into the field of hermeneutics. In 1960 Gadamer published Truth and Method, regarded by many as philosophical hermeneutics’ most significant advance since Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. A central tenet of Truth and Method is Gadamer’s contention that ‘truth’ can be revealed through scientific investigation. Acknowledging a major limitation of hermeneutic analysis, Gadamer announces that ‘every translation is clearer and flatter than its original’; any understanding has to be appreciated as an act of interpretation that excludes certain textual components whilst ‘spotlighting’ others.

In The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, Ricoeur provides a more holistic interpretation than that offered by traditional approaches to hermeneutics. Addressing the impact of hermeneutics’ cultural heritage Ricoeur discusses how differences in analysts’ backgrounds will influence their ‘readings’: analysts from diverse cultures will inevitably interpret the same text or component differently. As Ricoeur explains, ‘every reading takes place in a culture which imposes its own framework of interpretation’.

ID

A term that designates one of the three conflicting internal agencies of the mind outlined by Freud, the others being ego and superego. This tripartite division is consolidated quite late in Freud’s work (The Ego and the Id, 1923), and can be seen as reworking his first ‘topography’ of the mind, the binary divide conscious/unconscious. Freud originally used the term unconscious to distinguish a part of the mind distinct from any conscious control. Seen by many as the most significant aspect of psychoanalysis, over many years Freud went on to develop a whole theory around the unconscious: how it was created out of primary repression, how its contents represented the drives and how it was enslaved to the pleasure principle. The term id (via Nietzsche from the German das Es, meaning ‘the it’) was introduced by Freud in order to temper the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious. Rather, the id and ego interact through the process of sublimation, the ego harnessing the drives for non-sexual aims.

IDEOLOGY

A central concept in critical theory, which is most commonly used in one of three ways. The first takes ‘ideology’ to be a set of conscious or unconscious beliefs held by a particular group of people. The second holds that these beliefs are incorrect, and that this fact can objectively be proven. This theory, which Friedrich Engels called ‘false consciousness’, is the basis of the Marxist/Freudian take on religion. The third uses the term to denote the process whereby people come to hold their beliefs: the most influential theories of this are articulated by Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser. The term ‘ideology’ was coined in the late eighteenth century by the French philosopher Destut de Tracy, to denote a ‘philosophy of mind’ or ‘science of ideas’. Soon afterwards, the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte was the first to use the word in a pejorative sense, employing the now familiar conservative debating tactic of contrasting an opponent’s allegedly dogmatic thought with his own common sense pragmatism.

The groups most concerned with ideology have been those interested in why societies are organized as they are, and in how they may be changed. One of the most important conceptions of ideology is that advanced by the nineteenth-century German political philosopher Karl Marx. Marx’s central contention regarding ideology is that ‘The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force’ (Marx and Engels 1977: 176). For Marx, society’s economic ‘base’,

the means of production and distribution, is the primary determinant of its social and ideological ‘superstructure’, its art, religion, etc., and hence its ideological beliefs.

Soviet thinking about ideology was rooted in the attempt to translate Marxist theory into revolutionary practice. A crude application of the base/superstructure model, known variously as mechanical materialism, determinism or economism, considers the base to be not the primary but the sole determinant of the superstructure. This reading of Marx reduces the complex changing, and sometimes contradictory, ideas of a 40-year career to a sterile, static orthodoxy, but this did not prevent it from becoming dominant in official Communist Party interpretations of his work in the

early twentieth century. Subsequent theorists, including Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser and Raymond Williams, have refined the base/superstructure formulation, suggesting that the superstructure possesses a ‘relative autonomy’ and can bring about changes in the base.

The Italian Communist politician and theorist Antonio Gramsci formulated a ‘culturalist’ Marxism, in which the consent of citizens is secured by the cultural exercise of ‘hegemony’, which works by subliminal persuasion rather than coercion. Gramsci’s theory influenced the French structuralist Louis Althusser’s formulation of the Ideological State Apparatus and the Repressive State Apparatus. For Althusser, who also draws upon the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan, ideology ‘interpellates’ (hails) individual citizens ‘as subjects’. Althusser goes further, arguing that ideology is ‘eternal’ and ‘individuals are always-already subjects’. This has led to the accusation that Althusser has simply replaced the orthodox economic determinism with a heretical, and no less sinister, cultural determinism.

The theory of ideology advanced by Althusser, and adopted and adapted by subsequent theoreticians, including his student Michel Foucault, has been criticized by humanists because it furthers the psychoanalytic challenge to the idea of the unitary self, and by Marxists who consider it unduly pessimistic in its view of the potentiality of workers and other oppressed groups to recognize and change their situation. Though it has proved controversial, Althusserianism has been embraced as potentially emancipatory by ‘post-Marxist’ theorists of gender and race such as Judith Butler and Stuart Hall, who are keen to demonstrate that characteristics ascribed to certain groups are not essential but ideological ‘social constructs’ and thus either have no basis in reality, or are at least changeable. As such, the theory of ideology remains a focus of debates about existing social structures, and the prospects for social transformation.

INTERPELLATION

A key element of the French Marxist Louis Althusser’s theory of ideology. The word derives from the French verb appeller, which means, ‘to name’. It is the process by which individuals internalize the cultural values, or ideologies, which are essential to the maintenance of the capitalist system. Althusser explains that ideology calls on us to accept unquestioningly certain elements of our culture as fixed, natural and disinterested, when they are actually contingent, learned and crucial to preserving existing power structures. It does this by interpellating us as free, autonomous, choosing subjects. So, for example, thousands of advertisements address us every day as consumers with unlimited free choice; when there is an election the various political parties invite us to see ourselves as powerful actors in the democratic process. If we accept these positions we have consented to our interpellation as subjects of the ideologies of freedom, consumerism and democracy. These are not necessarily false positions, but the choice between consumer products or between political parties is limited. Our acceptance of ideological subject positions implicates us in the preservation of society and politics as it stands, instead of inviting us to imagine a non-consumerist world with a more genuinely representative and participatory democratic system.

INTERTEXTUALITY

Coined by Julia Kristeva, ‘intertextuality’ is a term employed by poststructuralist critics. To say that a text’s meaning is ‘intertextual’ is to claim that it derives its meanings from its relationships with other texts, for example through overt or covert allusions and references. Meaning is not, therefore, something which inheres in that text and only that text; it is relational. Similarly, no text is seen as autonomous; instead, every text is made up of many other texts. Derived in part from Saussure’s theory of language as a system of differences, the notion of intertextuality implies that a text does not contain stable and definitive meanings, but instead produces meanings through its relations with other texts and through the contexts into which it is put. As the text is constantly entering into new relations and contexts, it is always producing new meanings beyond those that might have been intended by its author. More recently, internet narratives, with their use of hypertext, have been cited to demonstrate the interweaving and interconnectedness of texts, i.e. their fundamental intertextuality.

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CRITICAL TERMS (PART 3)

CRITICAL TERMS 

JOUISSANCE

French term derived from the verb jouir, which means to enjoy or to take pleasure, and also to have the right to something. In contrast to a similar term, plaisir, it denotes an extreme form of pleasure: ecstatic or orgasmic bliss that transcends or even shatters one’s everyday experience of the world. The term is most frequently employed by psychoanalytic theorists, and is most influentially defined by Jacques Lacan, for whom it denotes the ecstatic moment of opening to the Other that disrupts the illusion of being in control of oneself: it is, he claims, ‘what serves no purpose’ (Lacan 1998: 3) in that it breaks open imaginary identity and social convention. The term is also crucial to the work of feminist theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray who deploy it as a means to disturb the rules of patriarchal discourse. It is related to literature by Roland Barthes, whose The Pleasure of the Text explores the way in which jouissance is produced at those moments in reading where literal meaning collapses to give rise to bliss.

LANGUE AND PAROLE

Langue and parole are two terms introduced to critical theory within Ferdinand de Saussure’s synchronic approach to semiotic analysis. Departing from the traditional diachronic, or historical, analysis of language structures, Saussure’s model separates language into passive and active elements, the langue and parole. Deriving from the French la langue meaning tongue, langue refers to a language in its entirety, at any one point in time, and includes the rules and conventions of its use – rules which pre-exist individual users. It is this determining element of langue’s characteristic that marks its active nature. In contrast, parole, translated from the French la parole, meaning speech or word, refers to individual utterances of written or spoken language that passively adhere to the rules of the langue. Whilst Saussurean investigation focuses upon the langue of societal communication, any understanding of it is inevitably enhanced by analyses of parole. For example, analysis into English parole would reveal that whilst it is appropriate to pronounce ‘the ball is red’ announcing that ‘the red is ball’ contravenes the rules of the langue and is subsequently nonsensical. Ultimately, the distinction between langue and parole is a distinction between code and message, structure and performance. To be understood, the latter must observe the dictates of the former.

LOGOCENTRISM

A term emerging from the deconstructive philosophy of Jacques  Derrida, it is derived from the Greek logos, meaning ‘word’ (but also sometimes ‘thought’ or ‘reason’). Derrida attacks what he identifies as the logocentrism of Western philosophy: its search for a foundation to all knowledge in a logic or reason or truth which is selfevident and self-confirming. In particular he criticizes the emphasis on presence within Western philosophy: for example, the belief in self-presence as the essence of being and the foundation of knowledge; the argued transparency or presence to mind of a meaning, intention or idea; and the alleged immediacy of the voice. This last example of logocentric thinking, according to Derrida, results in phonocentrism: the privileging of speech over writing, which is seen as secondary, merely the representation of speech and thought. In Of Grammatology (1997) and elsewhere, Derrida tackles this phonocentrism, opposing to it his own ‘graphocentrism’ and desire for a ‘science of writing’ which figures writing as originating rather than

merely representing meaning, as primary rather than secondary. This ‘primary writing’ is not, however, present and transparent to itself in the way that speech has traditionally been figured as being, but is a product of difference and the trace. Derrida also sets out to reveal the dependence of presence upon its opposite, absence, in this way demonstrating that there is no such thing as pure presence or an absolute origin or foundation. So anything which is brought forward as an example of pure presence or meaning-initself can be revealed to be a product or effect of something else, or to owe its meaning to its relation with some other (absent) word or thing.

Feminist critics such as Hélène Cixous have put their own slant upon this Derridean idea of logocentrism by attacking what they regard as the phallogocentrism of Western culture – so they are interpreting the focus on reason, logic and presence which Derrida has identified as a peculiarly masculinist obsession and one designed to perpetuate patriarchal dominance.

METANARRATIVE

This term is used in two distinct ways. In narratology it was coined by Gérard Genette in his highly influential Narrative Discourse to refer to embedded narratives, i.e. to stories within stories. These embedded narratives often form the main part of the text but are framed by another story (known as a frame narrative). Well-known examples of the use of metanarrative as a structuring device include Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales where each tale is a metanarrative within the frame narrative of the pilgrims’ journey to Canterbury; Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw where acquaintances are gathered together for Christmas and are told the story that becomes the longer metanarrative; Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness where the narrator Marlow and his fellow sailors are reciting tales to pass the time and Marlow recounts the story of his search for Kurtz which again forms a much longer narrative.

‘Metanarrative’ is used in a different way by the French critic Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition. He characterizes postmodernism as ‘an incredulity towards metanarratives’ (Lyotard 1984: xxiv), by which he means that it challenges and interrogates the dominant ‘stories’ (or totalizing discourses) that are used to uphold Western modernity. Such ‘stories’ are those that seek to provide a ‘total’ or overarching explanation for the way things are, and include Christianity, liberal humanism and Marxism. Lyotard argues that these metanarratives are deceptive in that they restrict heterogeneity, and that postmodern criticism should actively refuse the homogenization they impose upon language and identity.

METAPHYSICS

A branch of philosophical enquiry which is primarily concerned with first principles, in particular those concerning the question of existence. Metaphysics represents a search for foundations and origins within philosophy. It centres on the question of ‘what is’ and seeks to discover an encompassing solution to the problem of the nature of existence. In this sense it has much in common with the notion of ontology, a philosophical system that is also concerned with existence (Being) and what exists (beings). Metaphysics therefore claims that reality has its own independence, separate from our consciousness. In other words, everything that is to be found in nature already has a pre-given existence. Metaphysical philosophy attempts to explain all that is to

be found in nature within one broad theory of reality. Metaphysical questions have been crucial aspects of philosophy since the time of Aristotle. However, the twentieth century has witnessed sustained attacks on the principles of metaphysics. The philosophy of Martin Heidegger attempted the socalled ‘destruction’ of metaphysics, whilst the rise of poststructuralism and postmodernism resulted in scepticism concerning totalizing philosophies of origins and foundations. The strategies of Jacques Derrida, for example, have attempted a radical undermining of metaphysical principles in order to question such notions of origins and foundations.

MIMESIS

A concept originally developed by Aristotle within the context of theatrical tragedy, mimesis is essentially concerned with how art imitates reality. Such imitation involves the display or presentation of action rather than the imaginative concept of action, which is termed diegesis. In other words, to imitate an action and present it as real is mimetic, whereas the imagination of an action is diegetic. According to Aristotle, mimesis involves the representation of reality, in particular with regards to human emotions rather than human intellect. Aristotle was particularly concerned with how the concept of mimesis functions in tragedy and sought to show how drama was an imitation of reality.

Mimesis is the subject of a comprehensive study by Erich Auerbach, which is primarily concerned with how reality is imitated in Western literature. Despite being 50 years old, this work remains one of the most important studies written on mimesis.

MIRROR STAGE

Concept associated with the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, which provides an account of the imaginary component of subjectivity. It is concerned with the beginning of subjectivity, the moment at which the child first misrecognizes itself as the image in the mirror, and the subsequent way in which this misrecognition is negotiated. The child, typically between the ages of 9 and 12 months ‘still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursling dependence’ (Lacan 1977: 2), is lured into an identification with a unified bodily image. It is at this moment that the child, previously an uncoordinated assemblage of limbs and organs, is compelled to conceive itself as a unified being. However, the primal unity that the mirror stage theory elucidates is the product of a split between the viewer and the reflected image. The foundational moment of human subjectivity is, for Lacan, a precarious negotiation of this necessary division between spectator and image. The identification

with the image is what provides the subject with the minimal coordinates of a unified identity, but this unity is founded upon a primary division of which, crucially, the subject is aware. Consequently, the moment at which the mirror stage bestows a concept of the self as a unified and autonomous subject, it also threatens to undercut this achievement via the uncomfortable awareness that such autonomy is illusory: that it is premised upon an act of identification with something external to the core of the self, namely the image. Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage has been influential, in that the continual renegotiation of the boundaries of the subject and the unconscious symptoms of the division between spectator and image can provide an account of the problematic and unstable nature of identity that has applications in fields as diverse as political theory and the study of literature and art.

NEGATIVE DIALECTICS

A method of critical analysis developed by German theoretician Theodor W. Adorno in order to decode the expanding world of multinational capitalism. Along with his colleague Max Horkheimer, Adorno produced a critique of reason in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (first published 1947), drawing both on their experience of German fascism and American commodity capitalism. The mode of thought seen in embryonic form in this book is further developed in Adorno’s posthumously published Negative Dialectics (1970). Adorno attempted to bridge the gap

between aesthetics and deterministic Marxist thinking by harnessing the work of the influential cultural theorist Walter Benjamin, after working with him at the Frankfurt School. Drawing on Karl Marx’s materialist adaptation of Hegel’s dialectic, Adorno sought to develop dialectical analysis for the demands of the unregulated growth of global capitalism. Essentially his method works backwards through the dialectical process of synthesis, attempting to unearth the contradiction at the core of dialectical production. He set out to detail the tools and methodologies necessary for interrogating the authoritarian ideologies that had been crucial not only for instigating conflict but for resisting cultural change (for example, nationalist rejections of anything alien or other). These tools included the ‘dialectics of disassembly’, a demystifying procedure that traces the patterns of history behind superficial cultural phenomena, and the concept of non-identity, the shadow of what identity excludes in its formative process. Adorno used these strategies to critique the capitalist exchange values that artificially organize and configure identity. Adorno’s technique remains central to the practice of modern philosophy and cultural theory. His work opened the way for analyses of globalization, neoliberalization and consumerization, and brings to bear a heavy influence on the work of contemporary critics of capitalism such as Fredric Jameson and Pierre Bourdieu.

OEDIPUS COMPLEX

A controversial theory advanced by Sigmund Freud, for whom the ancient Greek myth of Oedipus held unacknowledged truths about the family unit. In the story, not knowing his real parents, Oedipus kills his father and marries his mother. Horrified when he discovers the truth, he blinds himself. Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) claimed that the myth confirmed an insight he had gained in his work with children: that a little boy’s first sexual wish is directed at his mother, and his first murderous wish is aimed at his father as rival. This ‘Oedipus complex’ is (usually) resolved because the boy fears as well as hates his father, whom he invests with the power of castration. He internalizes his father’s authority which becomes his superego or conscience (Oedipus punishes himself), represses his original wishes and finds other sexual objects. Pushed into the unconscious, the repressed wishes return to disrupt conscious existence in the form of slips of the tongue, double meanings and symptoms. They are also released in dreams, which Freud calls the ‘royal road’ to the unconscious. Initially Freud thought that girls desire their fathers and hate their mothers. He later reconsidered: the female infant also finds her first sexual object in her mother, later transferring affection to her father. Freud has attracted feminist criticism for his argument that women are already ‘castrated’ and therefore never acquire a full superego. Freud’s theory describes civilization beginning when an illegitimate urge is subjected to the rule of law. For Freud’s reinterpreter Jacques Lacan, this takes the form of internalizing a language, and the name of the Father as symbol of Law, by a subject whose desire nonetheless persists in the unconscious. We may not want our mothers all our lives, but we never stop wanting something that language cannot give. The Oedipus complex thus generates an account of subjectivity as a site of perpetual conflict between desire and law.

ORIENTALISM

This term refers to the ways in which the West has represented, or rather misrepresented, the East throughout history. In his ground-breaking work, Orientalism (1978), Edward W. Said describes Orientalism as the construction of a ‘system of knowledge’ about the East by and for the West. This knowledge was compiled by a range of European travellers, explorers, colonialists, archivists, writers and novelists over centuries. For major theorists working in the field, Orientalism rests on the idea that, in the process of misrepresentation, the West has fundamentally constructed the East in order to define itself. European culture plays a significant role in this process. Just as the history of English literature, for example, has always been bound up in defining the concept of nationhood, in representing what it means to be British or rather English, so for commentators such as Said it has defined the Orient (and the rest of the world). In the nineteenth-century English novel, in particular, the East is frequently described as a distinctly different, irrational and ‘other’ space to England. The Orient is portrayed as a place of mystery, enchantment, adventure and colour, but also one of sex, sensuality and some danger for Europeans. As Said puts it, ‘the Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences’. He goes on to argue that the West identified itself as the complete antithesis of these representations. The resulting conflict between a familiar, rational Europe, and a strange, irrational Orient is crucial to the development of Western notions about its identity. Said maintains that Orientalism is ‘a collective notion identifying “us” Europeans as against all “those” non-Europeans’. It is this tension, he concludes, that underpins the continued sense of opposition between East and West throughout the modern world. Since Said’s intervention, critical theory has increasingly questioned Western assumptions about the East. Orientalism is now also explored as a crucial but complex feature of the relationship between Western culture and imperialism. It has become a key concept in literary, cultural and postcolonial studies.

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CRITICAL TERMS (PART 4)

CRITICAL TERMS 

OTHER

A term used widely within critical theory, predominantely in disciplines such as psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory. However, the term also emerges from traditions of philosophy, such as Levinas’s ethical theory. It must therefore be apparent that ‘other’ as concept will have a wide variety of applications. Although this is the case, it can be said that the ‘other’ – either as a human being or an inanimate object – exists in relationship to a subject from which it differs. The theoretical framework that surrounds the use of the term in psychoanalysis is perhaps the most extensive and cohesive in mapping out this specific relationship, though it could be said to have had origins in Alexandre Kojève’s work as much as in that of Sigmund Freud. Jacques Lacan centres this discussion around ‘objet petit a’, where the ‘a’ is a quasi-algebraic sign indicating ‘autre’ (other). This ‘objet petit a’ is a concept developed from Freud, and his term ‘object’, where ‘object’ is defined as the aim of a subject’s drive. For instance, the object of the sexual drive in a certain human being at a certain time may be an actor or an actress on the front cover of a glossy magazine, or a part of that body, such as the breast or the torso. Alternatively, the aim of a subject’s drive at a particular time may be for an object that is not human: a new house, a new car, a new dress or a new DVD.

In this way ‘objet petit a’, in Lacan, emerges from the ‘other’. However the term ‘other’ is in turn divided in meaning, becoming ‘other’ and ‘Other’ (the ‘Autre’ or ‘grand-Autre’). Lacan makes this distinction in order to indicate a radical differentiation in the relationship of the subject between these two modalities. The small ‘other’ is used to represent the mapping of the subject’s own desire onto something or someone else. For example, that boy must be in love with me because I am in love with him. In this way it can be seen that the small ‘other’ indicates that which is not really ‘other’. Indeed, Lacan’s privileged example is the mirror image, where not only identification occurs, but also alienation, due to the decentring effect of contemplating the otherness of the image of me.

In contrast, the big ‘Other’ is used to indicate the law, society, religion and other people. Or rather, the law, society, religion and other people encountered symbolically through their effects on me, the subject. In this way, ‘I’, or ‘me’ (my identity), is possible only through the symbolic order. If I am born in France of French parents I will tend to grow up French, speaking French. Thus ‘I’ am not really ‘me’ at all. My identity is an internalized version of the symbolic order, the big ‘Other’. It was this line of thought that Louis Althusser developed in conjunction with ideology (from Karl Marx) when he outlined law, society and religion as Ideological State Apparatuses and the concept of interpellation as the way in which their effects are internalized.

In postcolonial theory the term ‘other’ is more straightforward, but, perhaps because of this, much more politically immediate. It refers, in essence, to the ‘other’ as produced by discursive practices. This idea of discursive practices structuring the relationship with the other is developed from the work of Michel Foucault by Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said and Trinh T. Minh-ha who use the term to capture the way in which the ‘truth’ about the East (in all its multifarious facets) is produced by the West.

PANOPTICISM

A term formed from ‘pan’ and ‘optic’ (‘all-seeing’), used by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish. Foucault derives the concept of panopticism from a diagram drawn up by the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham in 1791. Bentham’s Panopticon was a model prison in which supervisors could observe prisoners in their individual cells without being seen themselves. According to Foucault, this system was effective because prisoners never knew whether or not they were being watched: ‘he is seen, but he does not see . . . what matters is that he knows himself to be observed’. Foucault goes on to argue that this constant sense of surveillance and visibility is what characterizes the development of disciplinary societies in toto. In such a society, ‘the automatic functioning of power’ is guaranteed because individuals police themselves and each other. For Foucault, the notion of individualism in Western society is in fact a direct effect of panopticism. The individual is constructed by having internalized the disciplinary power of penitentiary and/or medicinal discourses, with their numerous methods of segregation and social exclusion. This is why, as Foucault concludes, modern institutions such as hospitals, schools and factories all resemble prisons.

PASTICHE

Whether applied to part of a work, or to the whole, implies that it is made up largely of phrases, motifs, images, episodes, etc. borrowed more or less unchanged from the work(s) of other author(s). The term is often used in a loosely derogatory way to describe the kind of helpless borrowing that makes an immature or unoriginal work read like a mosaic of quotations. More precisely, it has two main meanings, corresponding to two different deliberate uses of pastiche as a technique. There is a kind of pastiche which seeks to recreate in a more extreme and accessible form the manner of major writers. It tends to eliminate tensions, to produce a more highly coloured and polished effect, picking out and reiterating favourite stylistic mannerisms, and welding them into a new whole which has a superficial coherence and order. Unlike plagiarism, pastiche of this kind is not intended to deceive: it is literature frankly inspired by literature (as in Akenside’s poem ‘The pleasures of imagination’). The second main use of pastiche is not reverential and appreciative, but disrespectful and sometimes deflationary. Instead of ironing out ambiguities in its source(s) it highlights them. It cannot be distinguished absolutely from parody, but whereas the parodist need only allude to the original intermittently, the writer of pastiche industriously recreates it, often concocting a medley of borrowed styles like Flann O’Brien in At Swim-Two-Birds (1939). A closely synonymous term, nearly obsolete, ‘cento’ or ‘centonism’, is relevant here: in its original Latin form it meant a garment of patchwork and, applied to literature, a poem made up by joining scraps from various authors. Many of the specialized uses of pastiche are reminiscent of this literary game: it may give encyclopaedic scope to a work, including all previous styles (Joyce’s Ulysses); it is used by writers who wish to exemplify their ironic sense that language comes to them secondhand and stylized (George Herbert’s ‘Jordan I’). And a general air of pastiche is created by many writers who, for various reasons, refuse to evolve a style of their own, and who (like John Barth) employ other’s cast-off phrases with conscious scepticism.

Fredric Jameson argues that parody has been replaced by pastiche in postmodernism, where all the cultural styles of the past are open to cannibalization and appropriation: ‘Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter’.

PERFORMANCE / PERFORMATIVITY

The principle of performativity is used, if not always explicitly, by such thinkers as Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, J. Hillis Miller and Michel Foucault. In one of its most important aspects, the principle of performativity has come to replace traditional notions of identity. Who, or what, one is is no longer based on the notion of an existing core identity, something in each of us which remains the same throughout all our changes in life, nor on teleological becoming in which one develops one’s natural predisposition into a fully fledged character. Overall, what the principle of performance reveals is the absence of any natural order that would constitute the ground for one’s identity. In a more complicated argument, it can be shown that any proclaimed natural order hides its own performative dimension and thus the fact that it is constructed. Here the space opens for ideological criticism and, accordingly, contemporary theory suggests that identity is based on enactment, i.e. on the performative construction of one’s identity by following culturally derived patterns of behaviour. Derrida and Miller emphasize the importance of language as a means of constructing identity. Miller’s concept of ‘prosopopeia’ (personification) in particular underlines the performative dimension of language. Here, we do not exist as meaningful beings apart from our enactment in language. Foucault and Butler, on the other hand, are more interested in how identity is generated within culture, or, more precisely, in the discursive formations which are constitutive of identity. According to Butler, for example, we are constantly forced to re-enact and reconfirm our heterosexuality.

PHALLOGOCENTRISM

A combination of the terms phallocentrism and logocentrism, which is used to critique psychoanalysis as a phallus-centred discourse that locates truth in speech. For French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who coined the term to critique Freud and, especially, Lacan, psychoanalysis positions the phallus as the origin of both sexual difference and the use of language. Derrida argues that by giving the phallus such a central role, psychoanalytical explanations of sexual and social development continue to reproduce patriarchal norms. Furthermore, as a ‘talking cure’, psychoanalysis grants speech privileged access to the truth of a patient’s internal consciousness while simultaneously determining what that truth is. Critics of Derrida’s attack on psychoanalysis argue that he confuses the phallus with the penis, asserting that the phallus is a signifier of desire that no-one possesses. Some feminist criticism uses this symbolic reconceptualization of the phallus as a point of departure for a radical reappraisal of the cultural construction of gender and sexuality. Other critics have used ‘phallogocentrism’ to theorize more generally the ways in which phallocentric discourse is made to seem natural in order to perpetuate patriarchy.

POWER

In the most general terms, power can be understood as the ability to effect change. Typically, this is thought to be achieved through the domination or control exerted by one individual, or group, over another in a power relationship. In this traditional understanding of the term, power is conceived as the end result of a difference in status between the two parties. The sovereign, or king, for example, is understood to be of a different status to his subjects and is therefore in possession of power over them. This asymmetrical and one-directional model of power was traditionally understood to be replicated in all social relations, so that the landlord has power over the tenant, the parent over the child, and so on, each possessing power in a manner similar to the sovereign. As a static model, this traditional conception of power proves inadequate to explain the means by which subjects gain status (and hence power) in the first place, or the tendency for power to shift, often through resistance.

Within critical theory, the work of Michel Foucault provides the most thoroughgoing analysis of power. For Foucault, power is not conceived as residing in a single source, as the possession of the king, but is rather diffused throughout the social structure and is exercised within and through it. All social relations are relations of power, but, in this instance, power is a causal factor for social asymmetry, rather than its peripheral end result. In his historical analysis of the development of modern institutions such as the asylum or the prison, Foucault demonstrates the mechanisms of power which operate by means of the constitution of the modern autonomous subject. The shift from sovereign to state control in the last 200 years has not, Foucault argues, brought about the liberation of individuals from relations of power. Instead, we have seen a transferral from a sovereign power located at a remote distance from individuals to one of state power in which the individual is constantly subject to discursive mechanisms of regulation and control. These mechanisms take the form of modern classificatory knowledge regimes such as medicine or psychiatry, which work, at a discursive and institutional level, to identify and regulate the movement of subjects, taking effect even at the level of the body through the techniques of ‘bio-power’. This process is exacerbated by the tendency of modern subjects to regulate themselves, collaborating in their own subjection. Foucault’s best-known metaphor for the process by which individual subjects internalize the mechanisms of social control is Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon (see panopticism). A nineteenth-century architectural design for prisons, Bentham’s Panopticon works on the principle that individuals, isolated from one another, and open to the gaze of an unseen central power, need only perceive that they are under surveillance for them to regulate their own behaviour in the service of social control. The selfawareness and apparent autonomy of the modern subject is thus conceived, by Foucault, as the outcome of new levels of visibility and surveillance engendered by the explosion of discourse around the newly autonomous subject at the end of the eighteenth century. New regimes of knowledge thus resulted in the formulation of ever more powerful techniques for social control. Thus, in Discipline and Punish Foucault shows that the new disciplinary regimes of the nineteenth century which sought to reform prisoners rather than punish acts were just as repressive as earlier systems. The complex structure of medical and juridical observation required to assess the reformation of the individual soul exemplifies Foucault’s observation that ‘the soul becomes the prison of the body’ as the power of modern governments is internalized by its subjects.

While Foucault ably demonstrates the networks of power relationships which operate within modern society, and the complex interface between power and knowledge, in his earlier writings he still conceived of power as both controlling and prohibitive, operating through the exclusion, for example, of unsanctioned behaviour. In the History of Sexuality, Foucault sought to revise this, conceiving of power instead as strategically dispersed throughout all social relations, located only in temporary shifting effects, and he included in his analysis what he termed micro-power or ‘power from below’, and the tendency for power to include resistance. In this aspect of Foucault’s work it may be possible to trace the influence of Nietzsche who, in searching for the causes for human action, claimed that a ‘will to power’ operated as a continuously dissembling field of effects, motivating behaviour. Foucault’s own influence has been diffuse, provoking new examinations of micropower and resistance, particularly, for example, in gender studies, while feminism had already noted the distinction between power and authority which makes such analysis possible.

RHIZOME

In origin a botanical term classifying the growth and organization of tuber plants, the rhizome entered critical thought in French poststructuralist philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1980). They develop a ‘rhizomatic’ model of organization in terms of material, nonhierarchical relations and apply it not just to organic but also to cultural, biological, and geological phenomena. A rhizome grows in multiple directions without following any predetermined plan or reaching a predestined ideal end. The importance of this concept for critical theory is that it provides an alternative to the Western philosophical tradition of thinking in terms of unities, fixed subjects and transcendent essences. Thus the meaning of the term ‘rhizome’ is given as part of a critique of the long theoretical domination of tree-like models of thinking in which central unities subordinate real plurality and difference. Subsequent critics have often used the term loosely to describe everything from grassroots political movements to the internet, seeing a rhizome as an inherently libertarian, anarchic resistance against oppressive, totalitarian structures. However, for Deleuze and Guattari rhizomatic and tree-like types of organization are constantly shifting. They are inseparable processes, rather than empirical or political entities to be described or judged.

SCHIZOANALYSIS

Coined in French poststructuralist philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (first published 1972), this term distinguishes their analysis of the unconscious from that of psychoanalysis. They argue that psychoanalysis treats the unconscious as a dangerous disruption to the unity of an ideal subject (psyche) and to the capitalist society by which this kind of subject is constituted. Continuing a long tradition of Western thinking about the subject and desire, psychoanalytic interpretation constructs the Oedipus complex to give the unconscious a single, mythical meaning. In the process, desire becomes a private melodrama, played without any social or political significance. It thus no longer threatens the subject or society. Extending French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s analysis of desire as a constitutive lack, schizoanalysis rejects this domesticating interpretation of the unconscious. Deleuze and Guattari make the splittings or ‘schizzes’ that constitute unconscious production the object of their analysis. Desire is understood as a process in which unconscious differences simply produce rather than meaning anything. Where psychoanalytic interpretation tries to reassure a fixed, unified subject with a metaphysical ontology, schizoanalysis attempts to continue the process of desiring-production. Rather than interpreting, it constructs a rhizomatic unconscious which further undercuts the subject’s supposed rationality and unity.

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